So, when I tell you I know quotes — I know quotes and I’ve had my life changed by them. That’s what is so extraordinary about quotations to me. You can take a book’s worth of wisdom, distill it down into a single quote, and it can endure through the ages impacting lives, perhaps even hundreds of years from now. Here are 7 such profound quotes.

1) “Nothing in life has any real meaning except the meaning you give it.” — Tony Robbins

Many people wave off Tony Robbins because they think of him as the cheesy, overly-excited, big-toothed guy they see doing infomercials on late night TV. This is a mistake because Robbins has a knack for simplifying complex ideas down into easy-to-use concepts that go beyond anything I’d have thought possible before he came onto the scene.

In this case, what he’s referring to is the fact that almost everything that happens to you has no intrinsic meaning. Is a funeral a time for celebration because the person who passed has gone on to a better place or a time to be deeply sad? Is the emotion in your stomach before you give a speech fear or your body getting you ready to perform? If you walk up to someone of the opposite sex and she brushes you off, is it because there’s something wrong with the situation, something wrong with you, or something wrong with her?

Once you recognize how arbitrary many of the things that happen to you are, you can stop merely reacting to events and start asking a better question, “Which of the possible interpretations of this event best serves me?”